Is it because of speculative investment? Basically. Here's some helpful audiovisual material: [this video] Around the 9:00 mark the get to the meat of the whole thing.
Explains speculative investment behind empty Chinese housing
"Immediately above us towered what could have been the headquarters of a bank — forty floors of office space, wrapped in a shell of mirrored panels. In its un-maintained state however, these reflective scales were falling away in great swathes, to expose the bare concrete beneath. Not even finished yet, and already it needed a makeover." [link] "the farmers that own the land here get the cheapest materials, and make these pop up out of nowhere": [this video] Follow-up video "Are new chinese buildings really falling down?": [link] tl;dr yes. Note at 2:30 "We saw this place being built three years ago".
Ghost city footage of poorly built Chinese developments
Here is video from serpentza/cmilk (2016) [this video] talking a bit about it. Basically this is investment, with money often coming from the whole family. No one really lives there. In majority of cases even finishing touches on properties would be unwelcome as it will lower resale value. They are being built everywhere (helps with GDP too). And plenty of developers are struggling with sales of new stock.
Chinese apartments bought as family investments, unoccupied
This video[1] was posted about 6 years ago but I think were starting to see the effects of the bubble they were talking about. In the video they said most new apartments were bought as investments as real estate is seen as one of the only "safe" investments in China. It would be one thing if most of these buildings were occupied by residents and only a percentage was investment properties but it sounds like there were many buildings in these new cities where practically every unit was an "investment property". The problem is these "investment properties" stop being investments when everyone has one. [1]: [this video]
Years-old video foreshadowing the Chinese property bubble
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